


move on me

by caelzorah



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, Reincarnation, Soulmates, brace for feels, i mean obviously that was where this was going to go so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-09 22:59:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caelzorah/pseuds/caelzorah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Lexa meets Clarke those are not their names</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. timing's everything

**Author's Note:**

> Reincarnation. What a magical word.

‘Do not be afraid, Clarke,’ Lexa says. ‘Death is not the end.’

Clarke scoffs, because that is the most wistful thing she has ever heard in her life. Later, pushing Lexa’s sleeve up by their campfire and analysing smooth skin, she gives the implication a little more thought.

‘Sprained elbow,’ Clarke decides. It’s not specifically easy to tell given the lack of an x-ray machine, but nothing seems broken and the swelling is a fair indication. ‘Mild jarring to your wrist and shoulder. Should be fine with time.’

Lexa says nothing, but stares as the blonde fashions a sling, attentive. Clarke wonders why she started surrounding herself with stoic types - they're so terrible for conversation.

‘If you’re reborn, who leads your people when you’re young?’ she asks after she has tied the Commander’s arm close to her chest. Lexa shifts back against her fallen log and frowns.

‘My second, if I have one,’ she says. ‘Whoever is strongest, typically. They pass the time until I return, trained and of a decent age.’

Clarke doesn’t say how alien that sounds because it’s probably still a more effective command structure than whatever flimsy version of democracy her people have been playing at recently.

‘Are you always of the Woods Clan?’ Clarke wonders.

‘Since the bombs,’ Lexa says with a shrug. ‘I found where I was needed, and my spirit stayed. It would not have known where else to go.’

She says it like it’s simple, and clear, and not even slightly absurd, and Clarke frowns and wonders why green eyes stare at her like it is something she is supposed to already know. When she says nothing more, Lexa sighs and turns her gaze to the fire.

‘You are tired,’ she says coldly. ‘Sleep, Clarke. We will go in the morning.’

 

 

\--

 

 

Despite Lexa’s agreement to Clarke’s plans they meet to talk further tactics every morning. Bellamy does not call in and Lincoln does not return.

‘The little Sky man is probably dead in the tunnels,’ one of the Grounders grumbles out at a meeting four days in, and Clarke feels every part of her body tense as she turns to him. Whatever doubtlessly toxic words bubble up in her throat stall between her teeth as Lexa beats her to the punch.

‘You will guard your tongue, or guard your neck – the choice is yours,’ the Commander says, levelling a dangerous glare on the man. ‘Keep yourself and your men in order until I tell you otherwise. Now leave my sight – all of you.’

If she hadn’t been spending her days with them for so long now Clarke might not have seen the defiance in his eyes warring with his shame. He shuts his mouth and says nothing, cowed by his leader, turns and forwards out of the war room. His equals follow him.

‘I’m sure your friend is fine,’ Lexa mumbles when her generals have left and it is just the two of them alone. Clarke exhales and shakes the tension from her spine, walks to Lexa’s side and goes about rolling up the Commander’s sleeve to check her arm. She doesn’t ask for permission because she knows enough about Grounders to know that it won’t be granted – but she knows Lexa well enough to know the woman won’t object. She will take medical treatment when it is forced so long as it is not in front of the eyes of her people; she is too wary of seeming weak.

‘The swelling’s gone down. But you should have kept it in the sling,’ Clarke says dryly. ‘It’ll take weeks to heal.’

‘I heal quickly,’ Lexa dismisses. Her other hand comes up to Clarke’s chin, nudging it up to catch her eyes. ‘Do not worry about your friend. He comes back or he does not come back, he still lived well. What did I tell you about guarding your heart?’

‘Nothing that sits well with me,’ Clarke says and watches the way the Commander’s eyes narrow with her frown. ‘I’ve thought about it, and I think you’re overcautious.’

‘It is a caution born of experience.’

‘Born of Kostia, you mean.’

‘Clarke-’ the Commander cuts herself off, and Clarke watches her choke around the stone in her throat and wonders when the stoic leader disappeared. The girl in front of her is not the kind to crush large men beneath harsh words and throw knives into traitorous hands – this girl is sad, and cautious, and buried beneath her grief; desperate to be heartless and grasping at straws to stay that way.

‘You never talk about her,’ Clarke prompts gently. Lexa looks at her from beneath a furrowed brow, and Clarke sees youth and loss and caution in her eyes with the glow of the torch on the wall.

‘She never should have happened,’ Lexa grumbles. Her tone implies an end to the conversation right then, but Clarke jumps up to sit on the war table at her back and tilts her head to encourage the warrior on. The Commander scowls and crosses her arms over her chest – and gives in. ‘Kostia was not my – she was not meant for me. I pursued her in spite of that, and she died because of it.’

‘What do you mean by “meant” for you?’ the blonde asks. Lexa glowers.

‘Meant for-’ she breaks off, and Clarke watches slender fingers clench into fists. ‘-me. The Commander. The-’ she gestures to herself in frustration, struggling for the phrase. ‘-Clarke, I don’t know how to explain this. I knew she was wrong, as I knew I would be leader.’

‘Reincarnation,’ Clarke says, and watches the young woman’s eyes light up at the familiar idiom and the understanding grasp that comes with it.

‘Yes. That was your phrase,’ Lexa says, nodding quickly. ‘When I die, my spirit chooses another. And so does she.’

‘She?’

‘My partner. My _other_ ,’ Lexa tells her. The Grounder says it with such fire, such reverence, that Clarke has to wonder what those words mean to her, exactly. There is a dedication and a love there that goes deeper than Clarke has ever even considered. ‘Kostia was not _her_.’

‘But you loved her,’ Clarke offers gently. Any weakness – any love – goes out of the Commander’s tone. Her gaze hardens with such suddenness that anyone who didn’t know her on a day-to-day basis, with a sword in her hands and steel in her heart, may have been jarred by the transition. Clarke’s glimpse of the girl beneath is gone.

‘She was beautiful, and warm, and _here_ ,’ Lexa tells her, and it almost sounds like an accusation, ‘and I was weak. She was a mistake I shouldn’t have made.’

Lexa calls an end to the conversation by stomping to the steps. Clarke doesn’t know if the Commander hears when she calls:

‘Then why did you?’

 

 

\--

 

 

Lexa avoids her outside of meetings, and Clarke spends her evenings watching Octavia train. There are aspects of Octavia’s apprenticeship that are a mystery to her – culture and tradition that belongs only between student and mentor, lessons that Clarke has no part in – but the afternoons and combat practice that comes with them are as welcoming to Clarke as any part of Grounder culture ever will be. Octavia learns to spar with fists, teeth, sticks, and swords. Most days it is against Indra, but sometimes it is another Grounder trusted by the General. More often than not the brunette ends her sessions bruised and bloody, favouring one limb over another and scowling, but she is not without her little victories – and the longer it goes on the more frequently Clarke sees her friend landing solid hits and dodging some of her own.

In those moments it is almost like the brunette can forget: her brother is gone, no word, and her lover has not returned from the tunnels that eclipsed him once before. Almost.

Sometimes – on the days that Indra orders a friend to trade blows with her apprentice – the warrior will beckon Clarke into the clearing and coach her through hand-to-hand. She is not a kind tutor – she leaves Clarke’s brow split, her lip bleeding and her ribs bruised, and does not pull her punches – and it is obvious that she enjoys laying the girl out. At the end of these sessions Clarke takes Octavia back to her tent and cleans both their wounds, and they each scowl at every graze and smile at every hint of progress.

A few days in Clarke throws a particularly vicious punch at Indra’s face mid-bout and is surprised to find that it connects. She apologises when she resets the warrior’s broken nose, and it is the first time she sees anything that even vaguely passes for a smile on the woman’s face.

‘It almost makes up for training two whelps instead of one,’ the warrior tells her lowly. ‘The Commander was right about you. I should have trusted that. She always is – in every life.’

Clarke smiles, and earns a black eye for it later on. She doesn’t prompt conversation because she knows better, but later - when it is just Octavia and Clarke and a tin of salve, tending to their wounds - Clarke questions.

‘Octavia,’ she begins, ‘have you learnt anything about their command structure at all?’

The girl stiffens and looks at her with cautious eyes.

‘For what purpose?’

‘Genuine curiosity,’ Clarke says with a troubled frown. ‘Would there be another reason?’

‘I-’ Octavia pauses thoughtfully, but shakes her head. ‘No. Don’t worry. I know some things. Not a whole lot. What would you like to know?’

Clarke bites her lip idly.

‘The Commander’s spirit is reincarnated, right?’ she says and presses on at Octavia’s nod. ‘But how do they know? If it could be anyone – how do they know it’s not just someone who knows their history and wants power? How do they vet someone for that?’

‘They don’t,’ Octavia says. She shrugs and pauses with a frown – probably thinking back on her lessons. ‘Despite where she’s born, or to whom, the Grounders believe the spirit shapes the being. I think she always looks pretty much the same.’

Clarke wonders if that mean Lexa’s love does too.

 

 

\--

 

 

All of the Grounder Generals are getting testy, but – as Clarke has almost come to expect, honestly – one of them takes it too far. His name is Axel, and Clarke knows him by his scowl, the angry tone he always uses in their meetings, and the scar that runs all the way from his hairline to his lip. He is young, and gruff, and tall, and arrogant, and eager for war – and he apparently decides that his Commander is holding him back with flimsy excuses; he mistakes logic for weakness and tries to expose it as such. By the fire one night, twelve days after Lincoln and Bellamy disappeared into the trees, he and ten of his strongest men attempt to stage a coup.

Clarke is talking to Raven back by her tent about explosives and how to build them when she sees it. Lexa is standing between Clarke and the fire, her profile shadowed by the throw of the flames as she trades words with her guard. Grounders and Sky People alike mill by the conflagration – some standing, some seated. Axel uses the lax firelight to disguise his approach, but flames are as good at casting shadows as they are at casting light and they catch on the glint of a blade. Lexa – distracted and facing the other direction, closer to the fire – doesn’t notice. Clarke pushes half to her feet mid sentence and waits for something to go wrong.

‘-wait, Clarke?’ Raven asks, startled by the movement, and Clarke shakes her head at the mechanic and hushes her, hand straying to the knife at her belt. Axel closes in on the Commander, and Clarke can pinpoint the exact moment that Lexa’s guard sees what she does. The large man jerks into motion, grabbing his Commander by the shoulders and shoving her away, and it is the only reason Lexa suffers a gash to the side instead of a knife in the back.

The guard moves to attack but one of Axel’s men comes up behind him – knife in hand – and goes straight for the throat while Lexa stares, hand drifting far too slowly to the sword at her back. Behind her, Axel readies another slash; Clarke doesn’t wait for him to have the chance.

She takes off – faster that she has ever run in her life – and covers the metres between them in moments, throwing all her weight into his torso beneath his raised arm. He is larger than her, and she can feel it, and it might not have done a thing if he had been expecting the tackle. She catches him unawares, though, so her momentum takes them both across the last metre or so and straight into the fire. Axel lands flat on the burning embers and Clarke lands on him.

Somewhere around them there is a shout, a slither and clash of steel, a gun going off – but the body beneath her writhes and heavy hands shove at her shoulders and wrap around her neck, and Clarke doesn’t have time to pay any mind to anything other than this. She chokes and Axel screams.

Clarke scrambles for the knife at her belt and finds it caught awkwardly between their bodies, irretrievable. Fire licks up his arms, plays by her cheeks, and thick fingers tighten around her throat. She sticks her hand into the flames, grabs a handful of coals and shoves them into his face.

The noise she is rewarded with is hardly even human, but his rough fingers leave her collar to wipe instead at his own burning eyelids – and then Clarke feels strong hands clench in the back of her jacket and yank her off of him and out of the blaze. Lexa throws her to the ground and turns back to deal with her would-be killer, still screeching amidst the inferno.

Lexa’s guard is dead, along with three of Axel’s men. The rest of them are standing at sword point and gunpoint, outnumbered in the wake of the failed attempt on the Commander's life. Clarke’s arm burns and she glances at it to find her sleeve on fire. Before she can so much as move to put it out Raven stomps up beside her with a bucket of water and tips it over her head and down her arm, dousing the flames. Clarke splutters and blinks water from her eyes, then squints up at the wildly smiling mechanic.

‘You enjoyed that far too much,’ she notes, and Raven shrugs, tosses the bucket away, and helps the blonde to her feet.

‘Might need a haircut,’ the mechanic tells her. ‘And a new hand. You’ve given a whole new meaning to “smouldering” looks.’

Two grounders stride forward to finish pulling Axel from the embers, and Lexa glares around the fire sharply. Raven shuts her mouth and Clarke goes to cross her arms until she realises: her palm is black, burned to hell, and the adrenaline coursing through her veins is the only reason she isn’t crying out at the pain.

‘It seems some of you are allowing yourselves to doubt my judgement,’ the Commander addresses. ‘You think we are waiting needlessly. You think being smart is the same as being weak. You think we move too slow.’

The grounders yank Axel to his feet and he howls. One of them stuffs a rag in his mouth to quieten him while the other ties his hands. They turn him around and Clarke sees what she has done to him – the glowing coals embedded in his furs, melded into blistering skin. She swallows the urge to vomit.

‘Take these men to the mountain boundary and bind them to the trees,’ the Commander orders. ‘The fog can have them. Let them be a lesson to the rest of you about what happens to those who move _too quickly_.’

She turns to Clarke with eyes that scream murder and gestures the young woman to follow her as she moves to leave. Clarke hesitates for only a second – long enough for Raven to shrug at her and mutter a parting “good luck” – before doing just that. Lexa leads her to the healer’s hut – marked by the tub of clean water kept in the cold by the door – with fast steps and a sure stride, takes Clarke by the arm and drags her inside.

There is a stone table in the centre of the room and a stack of shelves with a low desk running the entirety of one wall, littered with jars and tools. The healer sits on the bunk in the opposite corner, bored without a patient, a dirty journal and charcoal in his hands; Lexa dismisses him promptly and glares until he scurries from the room.

Clarke lets herself be shoved back to sit on the stone slab and watches idly as the other young woman searches the shelves, shoving jars around amidst the structured mess until she finds the one she’s looking for. She tuts when she finds it, scrounges up a bandage, and strides over to drop them at Clarke’s side on the archaic operating table.

‘A needle and thread,’ Clarke prompts, smiling in spite of the sombre mood when the grounder scowls at her. Her hand throbs painfully, and she persist. ‘For your side, Lexa. You’re bleeding.’

‘Later,’ the Commander grumbles. Her eyes narrow and her tone promises retribution if she is disobeyed. ‘Stay.’

She disappears out the door for a moment before returning with a bowl of water, cooled by the night air. A rough hand wraps around Clarke’s wrist and turns it to expose her palm – blackened by the embers of the fire, cracked and bleeding. The Commander tears a strip of cloth from her sleeve and wets it. Despite the tight grip on her wrist the stroke of the cloth against Clarke’s hand is gentle – though hardly less painful for it. Lexa washes the ash away and exposes the red, blistering skin underneath.

‘Soak,’ she orders sharply, pushing the water bowl to Clarke’s side and glaring at her beneath a furrowed brow. When the Ark leader’s hand is submerged in the water, coaxing the heat from her palms, Lexa nudges her way between Clarke’s knees, pushes blonde hair back behind reddening ears and drags the cloth across the skin of Clarke’s cheek as well. Clark winces at the scratching feeling that comes with the motion and stares at the warrior, noting her frown and the few drops of blood staining her brow.

‘May I ask you a question?’ Clarke asks, hazarding to breach the silence. Lexa’s eyes flicker to hers for a moment before they focus back on the raw skin, lips pursing.

‘That depends,’ she says lowly. She is clearly fuming – though whether that is at her men’s betrayal or Clarke’s reckless handling of it is a mystery.

‘Did you ever love anyone else?’ Clarke queries, disregarding the qualifier. She ignores the way the cloth pauses against her skin. ‘Other than your partner? Or was it just Kostia.’

‘Clarke,’ comes the warning.

‘A yes or no will suffice,’ the Arker says smartly, lifting her burnt hand from the water bowl and using wet fingers to wipe the splatter of blood from the Commander’s face. Lexa glowers and throws the dirtied cloth to the side, catches Clarke’s hand and returns it to the water.

‘Yes,’ she mumbles. ‘Now leave your burn to cool.’

She avoids Clarke’s eyes – leans around her for the dusty jar and busies herself with the catch. Clarke just watches her, and waits. Lexa doesn’t speak again until her finger are coated in whichever salve she’s chosen for the occasion and she is sweeping them across Clarke’s cheek, her jaw, down to her neck.

‘Several times. I married thrice, that I can recall,’ the Commander grunts out, despite her initial reluctance. ‘In lifetimes when I was born too early or too late, or where we didn’t meet.’

‘What made Kostia different?’

‘Me,’ Lexa says. Her fingers pause on their way down Clarke’s neck and she considers the question further. ‘This world. It’s changed. I am not now who I once was. The lives I have led here are infinitely more dangerous – for me, and for anyone around me. I – loved her more deeply than I intended.’

She blinks and pulls Clarke’s hand from the water again, pressing her fingers to the Ark leader’s palm to test the temperature. The Commander apparently deems her skin cool enough as she dries it off and slathers it with salve.

‘Did your partner love others?’

‘With frequency,’ Lexa growls. She pokes at Clarke’s hand, and Clarke nudges her wounded side with a knee in return. They both wince. The Commander grumbles. ‘We were made for one another, but the circumstances always changed. We were not always what the other needed. I do not blame her for finding happiness with others when I was not available to provide it.’

Her jaw clenches, and Clarke watches quietly as calloused fingers reach for the bandage and set about wrapping Clarke’s blistering hand. They are silent, and Lexa’s actions are precise. Her gaze does not lift from Clarke’s raw fingers, even when they are covered by gauze.

‘Hey,’ Clarke says when the bandage is tied. She takes her free hand and bumps Lexa’s chin up with gentle fingers. Green eyes lock on hers, wild. ‘She wouldn’t blame you either.’

Lexa holds her gaze for a few long seconds, hands lowering to Clarke’s knees while she rocks forward slightly on her feet, and for a moment Clarke is almost convinced the Commander is going to lean in and – Lexa smiles, barely, and ducks her head, and pushes away to look for rubbing alcohol and thread.

‘Stop being reasonable and stitch me up.’

Clarke rolls her eyes, hops off the table and moves to comply.

 

 

\--

 

 

The burns heal quickly, assisted by the Grounders’ salve. The rawness of Clarke’s face subsides in two days, but her hand takes longer. Lexa forces her to stay after every morning meeting for a week and a half so that the Commander can change the bandages herself; the redness wanes and Clarke is left with smooth pink skin that is sensitive to the touch and no longer needs to be bound.

Axel and his men die, as promised, in the acid fog – one of Lexa’s guards reports it back four days after the sentence – and it allays the other Grounder’s restlessness for perhaps a week. They rehash the plan, and Clarke proposes a bomb to be planted during the attack – a blast that will let them all get away back into the tunnels beneath and leave the Mountain Men to choke on radiation in their wake. Then they start fidgeting again – grabbing at weapons by the campfire and complaining for lack of motion – and Lexa seems half a mind to join them. Clarke soothes her with soft words and reason, and the cool mantra of “give it time – Bellamy will come through – just another day” while she removes the girl’s stitches and checks her sprained arm - healed now, of course. She says it, and hopes, but it has been weeks now with nothing from Bellamy and she is just as close to throwing caution to the wind as they are.

She doesn’t have to. Right when they reach the end of their rope Raven’s radio echoes at them with something other than static. Clarke’s heart sinks when it is Jasper’s voice they hear.

‘Tell Clarke she has the go-ahead,’ he says. ‘Bellamy’s down, but the job’s done. I’ve got you from here. Hurry.’

They scramble to respond, hundreds running into the trees – following plans that have been made and remade more times than they can count, burned into their brains by time and tension. Half move to lure the Reapers from the mines – hopefully to incapacitate them rather than kill. Lexa’s company goes for the tunnels with the aim of breaching the mountain and Clarke goes with them – with Abby and Kane and Octavia and thirty other Arkers at her heels. She wonders who will open the doors for them down below, what happened to Bellamy that kept him from disabling their defences for so long. Something has gone terribly wrong and she doesn’t know who they have left inside. Either way, their rushed trek through the woods is unhindered by poison fog or any other nasty surprises that Mount Weather may have hidden in its depths. Lexa halts them by the tunnel entrance and turns to take in her people.

‘Brace yourselves,’ she calls. ‘We will take the mountain, and get our people back with it, but the enemy will be vicious. Some of us will die. You will have an hour before the Ark bomb goes off; retreat before then. Will you follow me?’

‘Yes!’

Clarke doesn’t know who calls it first, or how it catches on, but the answer is resounding. Lexa commands loyalty from her people and Clarke has always known it, but it has never been clearer how much of it she has earned. The Commander looks over their group critically, eyes masked in warpaint, and Clarke knows that this moment and everything that it will lead to will haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.  Dark eyes turn to Clarke and there is something hostile in them and something soft; Clarke cannot identify either.

‘And you?’ Lexa asks – quieter, just for her, jaw rigid. 

‘Until it kills me,’ Clarke responds without hesitation. Lexa frowns while Kane fidgets beside them. Despite her stone expression, her voice gives away a hint of pain, of fear, of wistfulness when she says:

‘It always does.’

A war horn sounds, and Clarke is not given the time to contemplate the meaning.

 

 

\--

 

 

It was supposed to be simple: break in, break the weak out, blow a hole in the side and kill everyone in their way. Somewhere in the midst of it all Clarke would put a bullet in President Wallace’s head for letting things get this far. As far as war plans go, theirs was pretty damned simple. Just a few things it didn’t account for:

Lincoln’s weakness, the three weeks it would take Bellamy to get loose and turn others to his cause, and – perhaps most importantly, given the circumstances that spiral from him – Dante’s creepy son.

Bellamy himself opens the doors for them, down beneath the mountain. He looks like shit. Clarke knows without asking that he has been caught, tortured, used – but somehow he has broken free, found Jasper, and passed along his cause. Three of the forty-seven stand beside him with liberated guns, and he makes to follow them back into the mountain until Clarke orders him to hold the exit. Octavia stays on him with a few guards, Marcus and Abby.

‘We'll send the injured here,’ Clarke says. ‘Treat urgent wounds and ferry them home.’

He looks like he wants to argue, but his knees quiver with the effort and she sees the moment he realises he is too weak to continue. She’s grateful; he has done enough already.

Clarke and Lexa lead the rest of their warriors into the mountain. The next half hour is a hunt – every floor, every room they can beat their way into with alarms ringing in their ears. They find the Grounders, strung up and funnelling blood, and release them and send them out. They find some of the forty-seven – running the halls, and hiding in rooms, and locked in cages in the lower levels looking gaunt and used – and Clarke knows for sure now that they will not all make it. They find Jasper, and liberate him from the control room he has locked himself in after Lexa’s guard beat the three Mountain Men standing outside the door to death.

Clarke even comes across Dante at one point when their group is down to just her and Lexa, three guards and two guns – all the rest gone (from this life or back to the exit with the wounded). She sees it in his eyes – the recognition, the fear, the apology. She doesn’t want to hear it. She remembers waking in a clean room, being given clean clothes and lied to just as cleanly.  Clarke hardens her heart and shoots him in the head in the hallway before he can part his lips and beg forgiveness, splays his blood against the cement of the floor. He has sat in power and watched atrocities happen beneath the ground for too long – made a mess of things, like she makes a mess of him.

‘IED’s set,’ comes Wick’s voice over the radio at Clarke’s belt. ‘Twenty minutes. Get out of there, guys.’

Boots sound in the hallway and Lexa grabs her arm to yank her back, and they all run back down into the depths, through dark halls and dark rooms and thirty flights of stairs. They get to the exit, and stand guard while all of their people funnel through into the tunnels – the wounded and emaciated carrying one another out and the strong toting weapons. Bellamy goes, and Octavia, and Kane, and Abby – Wick stumbles down the stairs with three Grounders at his side and a manic smile on his face and he says 'they’re not defusing that thing,' before he bolts away into the dark, 'no way in hell'.

When it is clear that no more of their own are coming and the distant sound of shouts and rushing boots echoes from the stairwell, Lexa and Clarke call final retreat and escape into the tunnels themselves. Lexa has three guards left, all with war in their eyes and blood on their faces. Reapers catch them at an intersection, kill one guard and send them running the wrong way. Marching boots follow them through tunnels, and then Clarke is backed up to a long drop over a lake far below with a Grounder princess beside her, and she is furious and so unimpressed at the parallel.

‘Again,’ she says, ‘of course,’ and ignores Lexa’s dark glance. Four soldiers in tactical gear turn the corner to face them, and Lexa’s guards bear swords against men with guns and laser pointers. A man in a bloody business suit who breathes the air freely and doesn’t belong within it steps forwards, the look on his face caught between rage and joy – sadistic, monstrous.

‘You killed my father,’ he says, and Clarke knows without a doubt that this man – Dante’s sick son – has Sky blood running in his veins, stolen from someone unwilling. She lifts her gun to fire, takes out two soldiers and finds her magazine empty. Lexa’s guards shoot forward, and Cage’s soldiers just _shoot_.

Clarke yanks the knife from Lexa’s belt beside her, darts forward and buries it in a slim throat, stares into his eyes as he dies and whispers: ‘It's not your blood. Give it back.’

One of Lexa’s men falls, and the other one struggles, and Clarke feels strong arms wrap around her waist and yank her back to the edge - into daylight, rushing water and empty air. She tackled a man into fire, once, and now Lexa wrestles her into free-fall. Somewhere above them Mount Weather booms and a slope is eclipsed in flame.

The water is no more pleasant this time around.

 

 

\--

 

 

Lexa pulls her from the lake. Unlike her mentor, she doesn’t crack Clarke over the head with a rock when they are sitting, soaked, on the shore. No more bodies fall from the dam and none emerge from the water, and Clarke knows that none will; those that are not already dead will have too much else to worry about to bother with chasing them down. They catch their breath in silence, and then Lexa starts laughing – shaking with it, letting it ring across the water – and it may be the most amazing sound that Clarke has ever heard.

‘We blew up a mountain-’ the Commander says.

‘Part of a mountain,’ Clarke corrects.

‘-and you can’t even _swim_.’

Clarke scoffs, and smiles – Lexa acts like it is the most absurd thing she has ever encountered – and forces herself to her feet. Far above them, Mount Weather smokes and ash spirals down with the breeze. They are a day’s walk away from home - if they choose to rush - and the nights are too cold now for wet clothes. Her jacket is soaked and she struggles out of it to lay it down on the stone shore, hoping it will dry in the sun. She follows it with her shirt, toes off her boots, and when she unbuttons her jeans she hears Lexa’s laughter choke off behind her. A glance reveals the woman is not at all in danger, so Clarke ignores it.

‘I lived in the sky all my life,’ she says idly, and steps towards the water in nothing but her underclothes and a smirk. It reminds her of Octavia, back in the beginning – free for the first time in her life down on the ground, unaware of the danger that was coming. ‘I guess you’ll have to teach me.’

 

 

\--

 

 

They set up camp to sleep that night. Beside the fire, out in the woods, Clarke probes for nerves.

‘Do you remember all of your past lives?’

Lexa is silent, leaning back against a felled log and staring into the fire – and it is not unlike the night after they locked the gorilla in the ruins of the zoo and treated their wounds by the fire. Clarke watches her stone jaw clench and relax again before the Commander flicks brown hair back over her shoulder and meets her gaze. It feels a lot like a challenge.

‘Not wholly,’ she says. ‘Moments. Clothes that I wore, places that I went, people that I knew, things that I felt. Some things are clearer, others are shadows through the flame. There are things I see with crystal clarity – triggered by familiar moments or objects, things – and some nag at me for days and never fully surface. When I was younger I thought them to be dreams.’

‘How many lives have you had?’ Clarke asks.

‘I couldn’t say,’ Lexa replies. ‘I don’t know. But I remember things – from _before_.’

‘Before? Before the bombs?’

‘Yes,’ the Commander nods. ‘I remember buildings, and cars, and televisions. I remember being in a city filled with thousands upon thousands of people. And before that – war and dirt, spanning ages. I remember being young with a sword in my hand and another language on my lips that is foreign to me now.’

Clarke can imagine it. And when she does, she realises with sudden clarity that somewhere along the way Lexa’s conviction has convinced her: this is more than Grounder superstition and shared delusion, or inherited psychosis. Lexa is larger than this one life, and Clarke believes her.

‘I have been a warrior in all my lives, Clarke,’ Lexa tells her grimly, eyes blazing. ‘In different ways. Armed with swords and guns and words. I was a writer once, I think – or so fancied myself. A soldier. A criminal. A judge. A poet. I remember it in pieces.’

‘What about her?’ Clarke asks gently. Lexa’s teeth clench and her jaw tics, and she looks away. Clarke feels a stone on the floor beneath her digging into her side and tamps down on the urge to move for fear of inciting the already scowling Commander.

‘I remember her in every life,’ Lexa spits. Clarke’s head tilts at the venom within it. ‘She is an artist, and a speaker, and a bleeding heart. I _love_ her in every life.’

‘But she doesn’t remember you.’

Lexa shakes her head, then nods. Clarke doesn’t understand.

‘She did,’ the Commander says. ‘Before the Armageddon. But we did not always meet, and we did not always meet _well_ , and the memories would come and go. We were too early and too late, time and time again. We fought together, and fought each other, and intersected at bad ages _in_ bad ages, and then-’

She sputters when she chokes, and Clarke jerks to sit up in alarm but Lexa is wiping her eyes and – she’s _crying_. And what a strange day it has been, to reign victorious over the mountain clan, rain ash across the earth, and to see the heartless Commander laugh and cry within hours of each other. Clarke pushes to her feet and approaches quickly and quietly – cautious – and sinks to her knees beside the Commander. Gentle hands reach out to pull Lexa’s away from her face; they encounter little resistance. Clarke hushes her and wipes the tears from smooth cheeks, and Lexa stares at her with more sadness than she can bear.

‘Gone. So few people in the world, so far apart. You have to understand – I was alone, Clarke, for so long,’ Lexa says. Clarke has never heard her plead before, but this is what it sounds like. ‘I was so alone. I was desperate. Kostia was never meant to happen. You have to understand.’

Clarke pulls the young woman to her and lets Lexa muffle silent sobs against her jacket because she doesn’t know any better way to calm her – doesn’t understand the pleading, doesn’t know where it is coming from.

(She whispers reassurances into dark hair because, somewhere inside, she does.)

 

 

\--

 

 

Clarke doesn’t sleep that night. Lexa doesn’t leave her arms, and Clarke doesn’t wake her – it is the first time she has seen the Commander sleep and she has no intention of interrupting that. She lets the fire burn out and leaves them to warm by the shared heat of their bodies, more worried about seeing in the dark than freezing. The Mountain Men may be dead and crippled, but there are other dangers in the woods and Clarke stays up to see them coming. Nothing does.

Shortly before dawn, Lexa stirs in her arms but does not escape from them.

‘We have a long walk ahead of us,’ the Grounder mumbles, voice rough with sleep. ‘Rest a while. I will keep watch now.’

They trade places, and Lexa lulls her to sleep with fingers dancing in blonde hair. It is the best that Clarke has slept since medical inducement in Mount Weather, but – characteristic of the world they live in now – she wakes suddenly some hours later with a hand over her mouth and a knife being pushed none too gently into her hand. The skin of her palm itches and curls around it. Lexa crouches above her and scans the trees, and only moves when she knows Clarke has awoken.

Somewhere in the woods branches snap beneath heavy boots, and Clarke resigns herself to the fact that she will never have a pleasant walk in this place for as long as she lives.

 

 

\--

 

 

They make it back to Lexa’s village coated in Reaper blood, dragging Lincoln’s reluctant body bound in his own ropes behind them. Scouts cheer along the path to herald their return – the two victorious leaders, back home a day late and bearing a gift. Indra and Octavia move to greet them – the former halting a metre away to converse in low tones with the Commander and the latter having a good go at trying to crash tackle Clarke right off of her feet.

‘Thought you were dead, Princess,’ the apprentice warrior says, lifting Clarke off of the ground with the strength of her bear hug.

‘You’re not that lucky,’ Clarke replies with a huff and a smile. She pushes the other girl away and gestures to the dazed man behind them, even as Abby and Raven and a particularly hallow looking Bellamy Blake head towards them from the camp. Beside her Lexa smiles – barely, but Clarke knows what to look for. ‘Look what we found in the woods. He’s a little drugged up, but we’ll get it back out of him quickly enough.’

If Octavia has something resembling tears in her eyes, no one mentions it to her – not even Indra.

 

 

\--

 

 

The next weeks are a mess of celebration. Sky people and Grounders share food and drink, joke and dance. They hunt together, eat together, live together, and lay their dead to rest (and there are many, many more than there should have been, and Clarke remembers every name). The bad blood between them is not gone, but it is held at bay by camaraderie and victory and the memory of a common enemy that no longer poses a threat. Abby takes a team to rehabilitate the Reapers, and one by one those men and women slide back into the populace with bowed heads and wary smiles, ashamed and welcomed in spite of it.

Clarke and Lexa talk briefly about the future – protection and integration, and an alliance that will last – and then they leave the war room and join the festivities and mutter plans over drinks instead.

They join the hunting parties and go with their people into the woods, and every night without incident is another brick knocked from their guard. Two weeks from the win, Bellamy comes to them on legs that shake less now, smiles and asks for a spear. Octavia follows him with cautious eyes and a happy quirk to her lips, glad for his livelihood and worried for his health. Miller volunteers, and Lincoln slides into their group before they leave – sets aside his solemn attitude for the occasion – and Lexa rounds up two of her guards, and Indra who insists on accompanying them. They hunt. Lexa’s best tracker stays at the front with Bellamy and Octavia beside him, always learning; the other guard chats idly with Miller, asking about Ark life and his days within the mountain, and offers some culture facts in return. Lincoln and Indra walk side by side and say little. Lexa walks steadily by Clarke at the back of the pack watching over their friends, a spear in one hand while the other knocks idly against the blonde's.

Clarke glances down and for a moment considers the touch accidental – but Lexa is resolute in not looking at her, lock-jawed, and there is nothing unplanned about it. She smiles and catches worn fingers in her own - and for all her stoicism, Lexa cannot hide the tiny jerk of her shoulders at the contact. The Commander doesn’t even so much as glance at Clarke but her rapidly reddening ears give her well away. Clarke feels calloused fingers twist hesitantly with her own and slows her steps to lag back a little further from the group.

‘Is this your best seduction?’ Clarke questions with a smirk. The red spreads to Lexa’s cheeks. ‘Brushing hands in hunting parties? How romantic.’

‘No,’ Lexa tells her, tone stiff. ‘I am usually much more forward.’

‘You’ll have to show me sometime,’ Clarke teases. She sees the exact moment that the words hit the Commander: Lexa inflates with the phrase, brightens and struggles to restrain her smile. She’s beautiful. It is the lightest Clarke has ever seen her – the lightest Clarke has ever felt.

She should know by now: that feeling never lasts.

It happens fast. There is movement in the trees – a glimpse of a shadow in Clarke’s peripheral vision, barely a thing at all – and if she was younger and newer to the ground Clarke might think it to be nothing. A trick of the light. Clarke is not younger, and she has been here too long; she does not believe in simple shadows. Lexa parts her lips to respond (“I already have”, probably – god forbid), and Clarke’s eyes scan the trees for another twitch and find instead a glint of metal.

‘Grounders!’

It rips out of her before she has the chance to think of anything else – learned in the weeks alone by the drop ship, a hundred kids abandoned on the ground to die. It means something different now – _should_ mean something different with an alliance and a comradeship behind it – but at first it meant “savages” and “enemies” and “imminent attack”. She knows that her friends will hear it as a warning and drop to the ground, or flee into the trees, draw weapons and save themselves.

Lexa doesn’t. She jerks to a stop, jaw snapping closed – confused, interrupted, probably wondering if it’s a slur. She works through it quickly – and Clarke can see it in her eyes: understanding, panic, rage, all in that order – but not quickly enough. Metal shifts in the distance and Clarke jerks around and shoves the Commander aside. She doesn’t hear the twang of the bowstring or the whistle of the arrow over the rushing blood in her ears, but she feels it acutely when it buries itself in her chest. A second follows. The sensation is not unfamiliar.

Somewhere ahead of them there is gunfire – Miller or Bellamy, Clarke doesn’t know. A horn blows – low pitch, staccato, three pulls: retreat. Lexa bolts ten steps past her, looses her spear into the woods and earns a startled yelp from amidst the trees for her trouble.

She turns back, eyes blazing – and Clarke sees her, for a moment, somewhere else: swathed in furs on a beach in the cold, shield in one hand and sword in the other, panting in the aftermath of a raid; free and standing tall on the prow of a ship, hair braided, beautiful and breathing authority; cast in shadow behind a bar, dolled up, nursing a broken hand – jealous, angry; splayed on a bed in a shitty hotel – all they could get on short notice – dark eyes and red lips that whisper “come here, love” and coax Clarke across the room; spitting out angry words in a small apartment that they share – so hurt, so in love; coated in dirt and body armour and outlined by desert and blood, just as gorgeous as she was in the beginning and twice as deadly.

‘Oh,’ she whispers, and Lexa stares at her, horrified, metres between them, lifetimes apart. Words bubble up in Clarke’s throat but when she parts her lips to speak them blood spills out instead. She remembers another war in another time – a rough brogue to her words that feels familiar and foreign all at the same time, handing out orders and expecting them to be followed: the clash, the hiss, the fire, and blood in her mouth. This is not the first time.

Lexa sees Clarke’s knees give out and Clarke sees _everything_.

Cold fingers scrabble at the shafts protruding from her sternum, and it is only the years of Abby’s tutelage that stop her from yanking either of them free. She coughs and tastes metal. Her body jerks with the effort. Strong arms come around her and move her to sit properly on the ground and Clarke frowns in confusion at the warm hands that move her own away, but smiles when she sees the source. Lexa has closed the distance to catch her.

‘You’ll be fine,’ the Commander says stiffly – but the Commander is gone, and there is only Lexa left looking at her now, a hint of fear and tears in her eyes. Clarke reaches up with shaking fingers to touch her face, and the Grounder just barely leans into it. ‘We’re going to get you home.’

Heavy footsteps approach, and it hardly draws the brunette’s attention – whether because she knows the gait or because she simply doesn’t care, Clarke can’t tell. Indra comes first with the two Grounders, and Lexa barely spares them a glance. Bellamy and Octavia follow, Lincoln and Miller bringing up the rear. They jerk to a halt the second they see Clarke.

‘Find the attackers. Bring them to me – alive,’ Lexa orders, all iron and rage and blazing eyes – and it is this moment, more than any medical experience of her own, that lets Clarke know for certain that she will not live through this. ‘They will die slowly.’

(Lexa will burn them until their screams die down, douse the flames and burn them again.)

‘Lexa,’ she sputters, earning a sharp glare from the woman above her as Indra and the two men disappear into the trees. ‘If this is my last life, I am glad that I have known you.’

It slams into Lexa with more force than Clarke expects; the Commander has been dropping hints about past lives and past loves for all the time they’ve known each other and they both know it, but it is a very different thing to say it back – to acknowledge it. They are more than these weeks together – they are larger than one lifetime. And Clarke _remembers_.

‘We’re going to get you home,’ Lexa repeats, somewhere between her practiced stone façade, a smile, and tears. ‘You’ll be fine.’ Then, ‘I only just found you.’

Clarke shakes her head, and feels a little more of her blood wetting her lips. She knows better. So does Lexa.

‘Lung’s punctured,’ she says simply. ‘Nearest camp is more than an hour away. I’ll drown before then – if it doesn’t collapse entirely.’

She pauses and feels the damp rasp of her breath, and Lexa glares down at her and curses – gods, stars, anything she can think of. Clarke traces her furrowed brow in hopes to smooth it. The lines are familiar – she doesn’t remember it, but it is a motion that she has followed before. Lexa stills Clarke’s hand with her own and presses it to warm lips.

‘Look after my people, okay?’ Clarke says, and smiles at the vigour of Lexa’s nod. ‘And my mom. Trust Bellamy – and Octavia, and Raven. They’re good people, they can help you. Make the peace last for the next life.’

‘For every lifetime,’ Lexa promises. ‘I will keep alliances and make more. I’ll crush mountains and build cities. I would run rivers red to bring you back to me. I’d build you a home if you would stay.’

Clarke wants to say yes – wants to give in to the offer and the sad smile that accompanies it – but that would be lying.

‘I’m sorry I left you alone so long,’ she says instead, and Lexa kisses her knuckles to hide her scowl. ‘I got lost in the stars. But I know where to find you now.’

Someone shifts around them, and then Bellamy is kneeling by her other side and taking her free hand, and Octavia drops down beside him, eyes wet and jaw wired shut. Clarke tries for a close-mouthed smile, and Lexa’s fingers wipe the blood from her lips.

‘We’ve got you, Princess,’ Bellamy says. Clarke squeezes his fingers in hers for a moment and releases them, and with that reassurance he draws a knife from his belt. Clarke’s hand doesn’t stay empty for long; Octavia takes it between both of her own, lifts it to her lips and presses “we’re here, we’re right here with you” into paling skin. Lexa runs gentle fingers through blonde hair, and Clarke has never – in any of her lifetimes – loved anyone as much as these three right now.

‘The throat,’ she says. ‘Like I showed you. Clean. Make it quick.’

‘I remember,’ he mutters. ‘I’ll even sing you to sleep.’

She watches the way his throat bobs when he swallows, and hopes he will be the last of her friends to do this – to kill someone they love in the name of mercy. They are too good for this. Too sweet. She wishes she could live longer, if only to lift the weight from their shoulders.

‘Your fight is over,’ Lexa whispers in the grounder tongue, and kisses Clarke’s fingers.

‘May we meet again,’ she tells them all.

Bellamy is quick with the knife, but he doesn’t sing to her– doesn’t have to. Lexa hums, and strokes her hair, and the notes dance in her ears and whisper in her head while she shudders and chokes, and blood floods her throat – and when the darkness closes in it feels a lot like coming home.

It is not the first time. It will not be the last.


	2. now's the time to let you in

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are the facts:
> 
> The first time Lexa meets Clarke those are not their names.
> 
> She never forgets the worst parts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for allowing me to rip your hearts out. It’s been a pleasure.

One of the earliest things she remembers is this:

The ground shakes, the mountain roars, and the skies go black with ash. She sweats. The soot clogs everything from her throat to her lungs, and she worries that it will suffocate her; it buries her instead.

(It is centuries before she finds out that it was the heat that killed her.)

 

 

\--

 

 

These are the facts:

The first time Lexa meets Clarke those are not their names.

She never forgets the worst parts.

 

 

\--

 

 

The Roman Empire is as filthy as it pretends to be gallant. They doll themselves up in robes, in colour, and talk about art and empires, but their cities are built on blood and piss, and they smell of it.

She has a husband who owns a gladiatorial ludus. Later, she cannot remember their ranking or the depths of their coffers – but she never forgets watching men beat each other bloody in the arena, slice at limbs with swords and lances, _kill_.

Lexa _wants_ that.

There are other things she wants, of course – and this is where Clarke comes in, because in this life they are friends, but things change when they are alone and away from prying eyes. Her husband kills her for it.

In their next lives they are slaves – beaten and used – and when the Third Servile War begins Lexa gets to try her hand at battle. She is good at it.

 

 

\--

 

 

Clarke is never a princess, but the Middle Ages find her as some lord’s daughter – more than once. Lexa is her friend, or her maid, or some waif in a nearby village who makes eyes at her regardless of her age. Sometimes they swap and see themselves the other way around, and Lexa gets a head for having power, giving orders, having people follow her command. They are bakers and farmers and peasants and cooks, and sometimes they are together and most times they are not (at least – not entirely).

Sometimes they die from illness, sometimes from swords. Mostly they die from old age – just, never together.

They puzzle over it sometimes – the things they remember that are more than themselves – but there are no answers, no evident explanation behind the experiences that they retain. They are reincarnated, and this is a fact, and neither of them can find a reason why. But they are the same, and that is comfort enough.

Meeting stops being an accident. They plan it – plan to meet, to share their lives, to fall in love.

(Falling in love with Clarke is easy, and no one else can ever understand what it is to be immortal.)

 

 

\--

 

 

They are Vikings. Shield-maidens. Valkyries in human form, hellions on the battlefield. They pillage and plunder and bloody their swords. Lexa has battle and Lexa has Clarke, and Lexa wants nothing else.

(Clarke follows her into smoke, into swords, fire, arrows, death, and doesn’t re-emerge.)

They live this life more than once.

 

 

\--

 

 

These are the facts:

The colour of their skin changes, but they are never strangers.

Death is never kind.

 

 

\--

 

 

Lexa sees coalitions form and fall. Pretentious men send soldiers out to slay in the name of religion. It doesn’t surprise her – things have always been this way. She dies in the Middle East twice during the Crusades, and moves her soul eastward instead. She lives in China, Russia, Japan. She marries. She meets Clarke only once in this time, and feels her absence keenly.

They meet again in England – and it is every bit as fulfilling as she imagines it to be, to share her time with someone so equally timeless. It doesn’t last.

Rats run rampant in the streets and bring plague with them. All around them, people fall ill – fingers blacken, tumours grow. Lexa wants to run from the illness – but Clarke is a healer and always has been, and she stays.

Lexa watches as Clarke runs herself ragged soothing the sick, unable to do much more than ease their passing. And then her fingers turn black beneath the nails, and buboes appear on her thighs – and Lexa nurses her through fever, through rash, through vomit and blood. Clarke doesn’t get better, and then Lexa gets sick.

They have both been killed in battle and bad blood, but Lexa cannot remember another death even half as grotesque as this one.

 

 

\--

 

 

They are in Germany, 1523, both barely breaching their twenties. They are both from farming families – peasants in an unpleasant time. Lexa helps her mother with the housework and her father with the farm – they keep little or none of the profit. Clarke’s mother is a midwife and is teaching her the trade. They meet regularly with little scrutiny – their families know them well as childhood friends, and they have lived so long hiding larger secrets than kisses behind barns so no one is ever the wiser.

‘There was a woman today who earned my mother’s ire by telling ghost stories during her check-up,’ Clarke offers quietly one day over lunch, and Lexa nudges at her leg beneath the table.

‘Did they scare you?’

‘No,’ the blonde replies with a shrewd glare, seemingly offended at the notion. Lexa grins. ‘Rather, it had me thinking. She spoke of hauntings – souls that clung to the physical world for want of fulfilment. Regrets, things they hadn’t done; unfinished business.’

Lexa tilts her head and frowns at the implication. She tries for placating when she shortly responds:

‘There is nothing that we have not done.’

The stare she earns is cold and inscrutable, and she does not understand the meaning behind it. Their people go to war in the following year – revolution spurred, as ever, by an imbalanced hierarchy. Country life turns bloody very quickly, and Lexa is executed with both of her parents before the year is out. Clarke witnesses it, surrounded by blood and smoke and men with swords, likely due to succumb to them in turn – and Lexa looks at tired blue eyes and remembers that conversation and thinks:

 _There is one thing_.

In her next life she doesn’t remember it.

 

 

\--

 

 

America. Lexa is the daughter of a baker, and she spends most days covered in flour and nicking her fingers on knives. Clarke is a healer, and she coats wounds in mashed up herbs to treat them.

They get caught kissing behind the church one day. She’s not entirely sure how it goes from there, but accusations fly and someone calls “witch”. There is a trial – though, not a fair one. Clarke is burned at the stake.

Lexa wanders into the flames after her, sickened by the smell of burning flesh.

 

 

\--

 

 

Piracy calls to them when it’s age is dying. Clarke steals a ship, scrounges up a crew, and puts her quartermaster in charge of public affairs. His name is Lucas and he is a brutish man – and very good at pretending to be the Captain. When Lexa joins them they are already rich, already practiced, and already loyal. They rule the sea together.

They spend months out on the water, sinking ships and stealing cargo, and running far from the King’s forces. It is the most travelling they have ever done in one lifetime – and the most fun. Clarke is perpetually suntanned, hands rough from pulling on ropes, skin dry from salt water, throat raw from shanties and laughter. She smiles and shoots pistols and wields a cutlass that fits her grip too perfectly. She is free – and Lexa is in love with her.

They share the captain’s quarters, and Lucas knows not to disturb them when the door is locked. One time, months in, when they both taste of rum and victory, and their hold is empty again but their pockets are full, Clarke offers her a home on the English shore instead of the deck of a ship.

‘Grow old with me,’ Clarke whispers when they are wrapped in rough sheets and warm sweat and each other. She presses it into Lexa’s hair, her neck, her shoulders.

‘Every time,’ Lexa promises before she is spent. ‘ _Any_ time. _Yes_.’

In the morning she plots a route to Nassau with Lucas before Clarke wakes, wanting for another contract, another mark. Lucas breaks the news for her when Clarke emerges onto the deck of a ship that is already moving, and the blonde pauses for a moment – face blank – before voicing her approval. She doesn’t discuss the idea of settling down again.

They get caught a month later – beaten and shackled and sent back to Britain. They are both condemned to gibbeting and execution and neither of them contests the charges. Their jailers parade them in front of a crowd, put them on a platform with the last of their crew and a line of nooses. Hanging gallows. Lovely.

‘Have we been hanged before?’ Lexa whispers while the charges are read, and beside her Clarke snorts. When she speaks her tone is derisive.

‘If you had, my love, you would not forget the feeling.’

Lexa cannot contain her flinch. It would seem hanging is one of the deaths they have not yet shared. They will be amending that shortly.

‘If this is my last life,’ Lexa tells her, ‘I am glad of how I have spent it. On the seas, sailing free for the horizon. Within your sheets, p–’

Clarke scoffs and rolls her eyes.

‘If you make another joke about “plundering caverns” I will hang you in the next life, too,’ she says, but she is smiling.

They are both yanked to their feet and led forward to stand ahead of a screaming crowd. Lexa is not bothered by their condemnation – she has heard worse things than “filthy pirate”, and in fact it hardly even rates on the scale – but when they place the noose around her neck she panics. The rope feels like a leash to a dog, and she longs for freedom.

‘It’ll be slow,’ Clarke mutters calmly beside her when the officer moves on. The topic is not necessarily pleasant, but the tone is almost enough to soothe her. ‘Ten to twenty minutes, typically, to die – but you’ll fall unconscious within the first fifteen seconds. Let yourself.’

Lexa fidgets and watches from the corner of her eye as their first mate receives a noose of his own – then their cook, then Lucas. Beside her, Clarke sighs and looks at the sky.

‘Was it worth it?’ Lexa calls to her gently, and watches pink lips turn up. Beyond them the executioner moves for the lever.

‘Every second.’

The floor drops out beneath their feet. Clarke is not wrong – Lexa will never forget how hanging feels.

 

 

\--

 

 

These are the facts:

They never grow old together.

Lexa is a liar.

 

 

\--

 

 

The French Revolution is a fun one. Clarke is all for upsetting regimes, and rants about unjust treatment, and segregation, and the third estate for weeks – and Lexa thinks that if you can’t control your people then you certainly don’t deserve to lead – so adding their voices to the angry masses seems like the right thing to do. They die in it – twice.

Cities rise and fall. Governments. Religions. People are hanged, and Lexa chokes with them every time. People are burned at the stake, and Clarke cringes at the thought.

 

 

\--

 

 

There are wars. The twentieth century is no less bloody than any that came before it. Lexa works in a factory in England while the men are away playing with planes and tanks and guns; she curses social convention for every second of it.

She has been there for two months when Clarke appears – stops in the doorway of their break room and stares and says, ‘oh’, like it never occurred to her that they could meet this way – like they never have before.

(Like they do every time – _every_ time.)

When all their colleagues have gone home and it is just the two of them in the factory alone, Lexa backs Clarke into the wall of a maintenance corridor and steals their first kiss in fifty years.

‘We should get to know each other first,’ the blonde laughs awkwardly, but Lexa shakes her head and ducks back in for a second and whispers:

‘I have known you a thousand times.’

They die in an air raid six weeks later.

 

 

\--

 

 

Lexa is nineteen years old and decides to study Political Science. Her professor for the subject is breaching her forties, well educated, beautiful – _familiar_.

‘Oh,’ she says when Clarke takes roll call, but the professor pretends not to know her. She kisses Clarke when all the other students have left after class, and when the older woman pushes her away Lexa is forced to note the ring on her finger and the title before her name on the blackboard. The blonde gives her a small, sad smile and says:

‘Not in this life, my love.’

Lexa switches to Economics the next day.

 

 

\--

 

 

She is fifty years old and she writes novels – they kind of suck, and she admits that. Married, two children. Her husband kisses her on the forehead and gives her gentle smiles and tells her not to worry, “her words are as wonderful as she is”, and makes dinner every Sunday so she doesn’t have to. Her son wants to play football professionally but will probably end up selling cars at the local second-hand dealer. Her daughter – _Laura_ – studies poli-sci and statistics, and will probably grow up to rule the world. Lexa loves them.

After her first semester at college, Laura brings home a new friend who studies sociology and looks a lot like a Professor that Lexa once had. Literally: _once_.

‘It’s like Groundhog Day,’ Clarke tells her when Laura disappears to grab her bag from her room. ‘You know – that new movie? You and I, doomed to meet over and over in an endless loop.’

‘Maybe minus the comedy,’ Lexa says. She smiles to cover the ache and wonders – if that is indeed the case – what it is that they just can’t get right.

Laura returns in a flurry, bag in hand, and Clarke grins wanly before they leave. It is the last time they meet in this lifetime.

(The next time Laura mentions Clarke she is in tears and their television set talks about a car wreck on the interstate.)

 

 

\--

 

 

These are the facts:

Lexa loves Clarke.

Lexa loves war more.

 

 

\--

 

 

They live in a time of digital downloads and mobile devices, and they meet up in college. Clarke is studying English Language and Literature and minoring in Visual Arts, and has been for two years. Lexa is a Criminal Justice student – for about three weeks, before she drops out and joins the military instead. Marines. It shocks neither of them.

(She tells Clarke over dinner one night; the woman purses her lips and says nothing.)

They buy an apartment together between training and before her first tour, and hardly live in it before Lexa has to leave. They trade letters. When her tour is over, Lexa returns to a home that bears all the marks of Clarke’s existence (and none of her own). There is a vase of flowers on the breakfast counter, loose-leaf sketches left to float around on every surface, the scattered stack of her senior dissertation on the coffee table (Lexa looks long enough to make out “Changing Representations of Sexuality in American Literature” before sidling quickly away), canvasses piled in the spare room, half bare and half flowing with colour. There’s even a cat – its name is Luka, and it is more at home in the apartment than she is. In all their letters, Clarke never mentioned getting it.

They sleep together and eat together, watch movies and go out, and Clarke smiles at her every day like the soldier is lighting up her world – but Lexa cannot help the notion that there is something wrong. She ships out for her second tour some months later with the customary kiss goodbye, and they write each other fortnightly for the next eight months. Clarke remarks about her classes, the looming prospect of graduation, and about not knowing what to pursue after the fact. Lexa writes about dirt, long hikes, bad jokes, and none of her close calls.

When she returns Clarke is just shy of graduation and running with a new group of friends. Lexa doesn’t know any of their names. The blonde has a position at a tattoo studio downtown, and when Lexa glances at her planner and the inked-in appointments it becomes obvious that the woman is quite the popular artist; Lexa didn’t even know tattooing was an interest of hers, let alone a career. She stays longer this time – ingratiates herself, leaves her own marks on their apartment, forges her own space in Clarke’s day-to-day. That nagging feeling of disconnection that she has been ignoring for years subsides.

The soldier has been home for months, and she finds Clarke looking at engagement rings online. When she asks about it Clarke just shrugs and calls it research – apparently she is designing a piece for a client and diamond rings are a feature. Lexa does not wholly believe her, but lets it slide.

(The alternative is terrifying).

Everything is fine – everything _seems_ fine – and then Lexa is called out for another tour, and Clarke shuts down. It is quiet, almost unnoticeable – a slight quirk to her smile, a dullness in her gaze. If she didn’t have centuries to go on, Lexa probably wouldn’t even know. Still, she goes.

It is a long eight months, and when it is over she is scheduled for one last tour before her four years are up. She mentions renewing her contract over dinner – out at a nice restaurant, because how else do you break big news – and Clarke quietens and says next to nothing for the rest of the evening. It leaves the soldier irritated. She has decided to reenlist without really thinking about it and she doesn’t think that is a problem.

(She has decided to reenlist without really _talking_ about it, and that is.)

Later, when they are home and free to cause a scene without the weight of wandering eyes, Clarke’s anxious silence turns to tense words. Lexa wants to be angry but instead finds herself jarred.

‘Why are you doing this?’ Clarke asks. Lexa watches the blonde’s hands shake. Understanding comes in with the tremors; there is frustration there. They have been sidling around this conversation for decades. Clarke has swallowed her words too many times, and Lexa watches her smooth throat strain and knows this will not be another. ‘Why do you always _leave_?’

Knowing an argument is coming is never quite the same as starting one, and the topic stuns her. She has lived more lives than she knows, and there have always been constants: Clarke, love, war. There have been lives where she has been lucky and all three have interwoven: she has been a warrior with Clarke at her side, and they have loved battle as much as they have one another. In other lives, not so – they have been born in different times, on different sides of an issue, or Clarke has forsaken war for art, science, politics and public speaking. These lives have always been marked with equal parts purpose and dissonance, and have grown more common in the last two centuries.

But Clarke has never asked her to choose before.

‘I don’t understand,’ Lexa hazards. ‘You know. If I’m out there doing battle then someone else doesn’t have to. Physically and conceptually, I save lives.’

Clarke scoffs.

‘By taking them. And don’t pretend it’s for anything other than your own sick satisfaction,’ the blonde says with a scowl. ‘I may not remember everything from the beginning, but I remember how battle felt and how it made _me_ feel. I outgrew it, Lexa, and you won’t.’

‘I was born for this, Clarke,’ Lexa tries, but her partner’s jaw clenches and she knows it does not appease her. ‘We have spent lifetimes together. Is that not enough?’

‘We have had _pieces_ ,’ Clarke argues, and Lexa finds venom in the woman’s voice that stings at her ears and grates down her spine. ‘I have never had you for a lifetime, and I am coming to think that I never will. In all my centuries, Lexa, I have spent more time without you than with – and no, that is not _enough_ for me. We have been here before. You will go, and you will fight, and you will die.’

‘Then I’ll die, and return to you for another life.’

The words are gentler than she intends – some last ditch attempt at romance, wooing words, a promise of eternity, a hope to calm the storm. Clarke shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders. She looks away, and Lexa feels the loss of her gaze keenly.

‘I am tired of “next times”,’ she says, ‘and I will not wait for you forever.’

They don’t talk about it again. For the next few weeks they pretend that everything is fine. When Lexa ships out for her last tour Clarke kisses her goodbye, and for a moment it tastes a lot like smoke and blood, war paint and desperation; for a moment Clarke is that warrior who stood beside her on a beach on the other side of the world, sword in hand and fire in her eyes, wishing them both a hard fight and a good death. Then she is gone.

Clarke sends letters. They read differently, somehow, to the ones she sent in past tours and past lives. They are idle things – recounts of her day-to-day, a loving script with loveless words. They are a favour. Lexa writes her essays, poems, novels in return – anything and everything she can to bridge the gap between them, but never “I’ll be done” and never “I’m sorry”. She wonders when they became strangers. Clarke’s correspondence dries up six months in and Lexa is left reading her last letter over and over again, crushing the urge to burn the words:

 _If this is my last life, I will not waste it this way_.

Her tour ends after ten months and she makes her way home. Her landlord stops her on the stairs and tells her that her lease has been paid until the end of the year while he hands her a pile of unopened letters; held mail that couldn’t be pushed into her overflowing post-box. The apartment is cleaner than when she left it, every trace of Clarke gone – the rooms are clear of sketches, of pens and paper, of paint and stray canvases, of Luka. A visit to the tattoo parlour reveals only that the woman’s been gone for months, and gives no hint of a forwarding address (the soldier doesn’t know if it’s that they don’t have one at all or that they don’t have one for _her_ ). Lexa is saddened by her absence – and briefly entertains the notion that Clarke was serious, that she will not return – but convinces herself not to worry. They have fought before.

(They have never fought like this).

With nothing else to do, she reenlists. Her next two tours are a breeze, but four months into her seventh a regular skirmish goes terribly wrong. Two members of her unit are killed and Lexa is sent home with a medical discharge and pins in her shoulder. After everything, she goes back to college.

She ends up studying philosophy. It doesn’t give her any answers.

 

 

\--

 

 

Years pass. Clarke does not come back.

 

 

\--

 

 

Lexa is young again when the world goes to war, but not too young to be without understanding. The television talks about science, and bombs, and space stations that Lexa’s family is not rich enough to reach. She watches the ships launch, and then the missiles, and her parents usher her into the neighbours’ bomb shelter to hide underground with the boy next door who pulled her hair in class when they were eight and only stopped when she gave him a black eye. He cries, now, and his parents hold him, and hers whimper and clutch each other in the corner while the lights flicker out.

The world shakes and breaks, and comes down around her, and Lexa sits with her back against a shuddering wall, covering her ears and scrunching her eyes shut while the shockwaves bury her alive. She knows that she has lived before, doesn’t know if she will live again, remembers blonde hair and blue eyes and thinks:

_If this is my last life, I am sorry._

 

_\--_

 

She lives three lifetimes in Washington, though it no longer bears the name. In the first, she funnels up from beneath the earth with a dozen other of her kind. They build a home in the ruins of a civilisation that razed itself to hell, and watch as the wilderness grows back in. Most of her comrades are young, and most of the old are sick, and Lexa falls back on a tone she used a thousand times in battle, and war, and bullies her way into the leadership role. More people funnel from the trees, and the world gets more dangerous every day. Swords and bows become their best weapons. They scavenge. They adapt.

When she is thirty years old a young man stabs her in the back at a town meeting for want of her station. Her people erupt into shouts and horrified mutters and Lexa whirls with intent to kill him – to take him to her grave – but he has two men devout to his cause grab her by either side and hold her back while she bleeds. She snarls, and ceases her struggle. He stands in front of her and smiles sickly, and thinks her lost to madness.

‘In sixteen years, when the depth of this power has gone to your head and you have all but forgotten my face, I will return to this place,’ she promises, even as the blood gurgles up her throat. She spits at his face and watches her blood and saliva wipe away his smirk. ‘I will slit your throat with your own blade. The last thing you will know in this life will be my eyes watching the light leave yours.’

He runs her through with his sword in front of forty people, but sixteen years later those same forty people see her promise fulfilled. Her authority is stolen from her with subterfuge and a sharp blade, and she takes it back with blood and violence and relishes in the fact. Her people form their own language and their own ways, poisons and antidotes, and call themselves the Trigedakru – Tree Crew, Woods Clan. They venture closer to the mountains in the interest of territory expansion and their scouts are eclipsed by poison fog, they find weapons from the old world and whole villages disappear overnight in lights and smoke; this is the life where the Mountain Men begin. Lexa buries herself in leadership and iron, and forgets about bombs and blonde hair, and everything that came before.

(Clarke is gone, and doesn’t want her anymore; Lexa doesn’t even know if she’s alive.)

She dies young – only twenty-three summers – the victim of some new illness running rampant on their radioactive earth. Her people root her out in her next life and put her on the throne before she is fourteen. They have handled their diseases; they have learned cures. She has two seconds in this lifetime, and they rule as a pair in her wake when she falls in battle.

These lives are littered with important moments, but they are nothing compared to the one that follows.

Lexa is fifteen and dealing with a cold winter, counting down the days until someone calls her ‘Heda’ and paints her face with kohl. She has been taken as a second by a woman named Anya who seemed, at first, more predator than person, but softens over time (though never entirely). Another girl is apprenticed to Anya’s best archer: Kostia. She is all hard lines with a soft heart – in some ways so like the girl of Lexa’s dreams, in others so refreshingly far from her. She is beautiful, and passionate, and dangerous – and just what Lexa needs.

(Sometimes when she closes her eyes Lexa dreams of blue irises instead of Kostia’s dark brown; she wakes feeling unspeakably guilty, but does not know whom towards. It has been so long – _so_ long – and that blonde girl isn’t coming back, Lexa knows it now. She buries the feeling.)

This life is hard – marred by tribes’ skirmishes, the looming shadows of war, the ever-increasing threat of the Mountain Men – and Kostia is the relief within it. Commander once again, Lexa leads her people to battle and forges alliances in iron and blood. She is hardly seventeen.

Loving Kostia is easy, and all eclipsing; losing her is just the same.

The Ice Queen steals her woman away in the night, and Lexa finds her love beaten, bloodied, and headless. She wonders how many times she has ended this way, how many people she has left behind. It hurts more than she knows – more than stay-at-home loves in peacetimes could tell her, or her companion of countless lifetimes who died so many times with honour or got left behind (and left her behind, finally, and Lexa can’t blame her but she does anyway). Kostia dies gruesomely and Lexa burns for vengeance and instead locks away her heart. It is the most terrible feeling Lexa can remember – from all her lives.

It gets worse:

Clarke comes back to her in a blaze of fire falling from the sky, but Lexa has given up on her by now. Her people bring rumours of the golden haired girl and her young hundred, and how she burns Anya’s troops alive. It leaves the Commander agitated and gritting her teeth over her war table, and she should know from that feeling alone – she should _know_.

She doesn’t.

Her other half comes to her with a stiff jaw and eyes that don’t remember and Lexa’s heart rattles in her chest; she loved Kostia – _loved_ Kostia – but not like this. The Woods Clan girl’s death hit harder than she anticipated, but finding Clarke void of their history after so long apart – Lexa doesn’t know which loss hurts more. Clarke is just as beautiful as ever, just as smart, just as ardent, but the Sky has changed her.

(The ground has changed them both, but Lexa won’t admit it.)

She asks to spare the life of a boy – one she loves, or did once, Lexa can tell just by looking – and the Commander could do it. She could glare her people into submission, crush their anger beneath pacifying words and pay their retribution in some other way, but something in her snarls and spits and refuses. Clarke has left her alone so long, doesn’t even know her face, and Lexa doesn’t owe her love any favours. Lexa condemns him to torture and calls it tradition; Clarke calls it savagery and slides a blade between his ribs to save him.

(Lifetimes later they are still the same.)

They crush their clans together and play at peace, glare in dark rooms and threaten knives at throats. Despite Lexa’s best intentions (and entirely by fault of her weak heart), they bond. Lexa makes mistakes; love is just as wondrous as she remembers, and just as distracting. Clarke tackles a traitor into live flame, stitches wounds and ties slings; Lexa pulls her off cliffs, tells truths and breaks down.

Clarke remembers. Clarke dies. It is just like every other time before.

Lexa leads their people alone for three years – takes the Ark apart and begins building a town in it’s place – before the Ice Clan calls for civil war. She crushes every thought of it beneath the bloody soles of her boots, but bends to the blade in the fighting. She is twenty-one years of age when she dies, surrounded by friends who used to be Clarke’s, and knows that she is leaving her legacy in good hands.

She welcomes it.

 

 

\--

 

 

Lexa is reborn in a small village out in the mountains (her parents name her “Aleksis” and she shortens it with age). Her father teacher her to hunt, and her mother teaches her to heal, and a girl named Cleo teaches her to kiss behind the smokehouse on Unity Day in her tenth year. She is apprenticed to a woman named Daunt when she is eleven – a short warrior with strong arms, and a tight jaw, and more braids than Lexa can count, who reminds her much of someone else.

Daunt takes her to Ark when she is fifteen. It is the first time she sees the city since her last life bled out within it, and it is hardly recognisable. The streets have been paved, dwellings built – a collision of wood, and stone, and the disassembled parts of the alpha station that is both elegant and the most eclectic thing that Lexa has ever seen. Octavia greets her in the foyer of the council building; she is in her late thirties now, braids in her hair and ink on her arms, with war paint masking her eyes – dangerous, and wise. She is flanked by two guards: her brother, Bellamy – tall, and striking, and stronger than ever – and Indra – into her sixties now, hair greying, but no less frightening for it. Daunt steps back to let them meet again, silent by the door.

‘Come to take back your throne, Commander?’ Octavia asks warmly, and Lexa does not know how Indra’s second came to steal her seat but she is glad the Sky girl kept it.

‘No,’ she says. Lexa may have laid the foundations but Octavia is the one who has seen it through. The citadel, it’s people, and the council over which she presides – these are all things that belong to Octavia Blake, and Lexa is not ready to take them from her. ‘I still have much to learn.’

Octavia grins wildly and they clasp hands, Indra gives her something that passes for a smile, and Bellamy goes so far as to hug her – and this Lexa has never known them, but has missed them dearly every day of her life. She doesn’t ask about Clarke and they don’t mention her.

She spends six months shadowing Octavia and her party in Ark, learning about their changed ways: their music, their art, the treaties they have drawn in her absence, schools that promote reading and writing as much as weapons and blood, their strange version of democracy that sees fourteen members of the populace elected in every year and gives Commander Blake the final say. Grounder and Sky culture has collided and come out better for it.

Unity Day that year is marked by the largest celebration Lexa has ever seen – fireworks made by an aged, limping mechanic and a chemistry buff who spent weeks in his youth caged within a mountain with madmen stripping the marrow from his bones. Ark welcomes everyone into its walls to share food and drink, and memories of the hundred who fell from the Sky, the blonde girl who led them, and the Commander who sheltered them in the aftermath. Lexa sees herself celebrated, and it is the first time that she returns to Woods Clan in youth and does not find it in a mess, begging to be put back in order.

Daunt takes her back to the mountains, then – back to the house she grew up in (this time) – and for a few years the calm life of a hunter is enough to keep her. Bellamy comes to visit several times, and he brings familiar faces with him – Indra, and Lincoln, and Raven, and Kane – and an aging blonde doctor who clutches at Lexa’s face and smiles through her tears. Octavia comes once, when her city doesn’t need her. The children Lexa grew up with get married, and her parents get older, and every once in a while a call comes from the city for help in a skirmish (Octavia tries for the peaceful solution every time, but is far from afraid of stomping out opposition when it threatens to begin). When Lexa takes her sword and dons her furs and forwards into battle it feels more like a duty and less like her lifeblood.

By the fire one night when she is twenty-two and out on a hunt, Daunt cracks her – very much out of nowhere – over the back of the head with the pommel of her sword. Lexa scowls at the woman and gingerly rubs at her skull. Daunt’s idea of camaraderie has always been a little on the blunt side.

‘You are not a child anymore,’ the woman grunts. ‘I have taught you all I know. There is nothing left for you here.’

Lexa wants to argue – just on principle, really – but her mentor isn’t wrong. She is strong, and doing no one any good by hiding away in the mountains. There is a greater purpose for her out there somewhere, and it is time she finds it.

She parts ways with her mentor and finds her way back to Ark. She is amazed to see how much the city has changed, again, in the last seven years – sprawling further, building up – and how much it feels exactly the same. Octavia greets her in the council chambers on the day that she arrives – into her forties now, with two children if her brother is to be believed. Lexa finds that when the Commander greets her the smile doesn’t quite meet her eyes.

‘I haven’t come to steal your seat,’ Lexa says in greeting, and watches armoured shoulders ease. She wonders how long Octavia has carried that weight – how long she has waited for Lexa to march in with righteous words and Woods Clan lore to back her, and demand back a station that Octavia has worked so hard for in her absence. ‘I have had enough of leading men, I think, and you have done greater things than I ever could.’

Octavia smiles, and fusses over her, and takes her to see Bellamy and the children that Lincoln minds. They are tiny things with strong limbs and dark eyes – twins – and Lexa knows that the girl will grow into braids and indignation as an echo of their mother and the boy will end with a heavy brow and soft heart, just like their father.

After they have caught up and shared a meal Octavia gives her directions – vaguely familiar, Lexa will admit – to a house not far from her own.

‘You plotted it in your last life,’ Octavia says. ‘We left it empty in your wake, but when you came back seven years ago – when we knew the whole “reincarnation” thing was legitimate-’

The Commander doesn’t finish, and she doesn’t have to. Lexa remembers the space she set aside for a home of her own, and the intentions she had to share it.

‘It didn’t seem right putting anything else there, we’re saying,’ Bellamy explains for his sister. ‘But you came back, so we built it for you. You’re gonna love what she’s done with the place.’

Something about the phrase seems off, but Lexa ignores it. Despite the way the city has changed she finds her way well enough. Part of the city is built up – three stories or more – but most of it is made of this: small homes with some space between, a small yard down the side for a garden. She had never understood the design, too used to living freely amidst the woods; it had not occurred to her that the Sky People had spent all their lives crushed together and desperate for space, and that finally finding it on the ground had left them wishing for less of it.

The newer parts of the city span out into the flat plains, but this area – the part where they started, back when a shifty electrical fence and a few guns was all they had for protection and the clans were getting restless – is cut straight into the hillside. There are less trees now than there used to be, but still more than she has seen elsewhere along the way; she realises that it is because this is the oldest region of Ark, home to the Woods Clan and the remains of the hundred – the people who were most comfortable hiding amidst the green. The homes here are more unique – built on stilts, or at strange angles, marred by time and tiny renovations: the first homes, back from before anyone knew what their city would be.

Lexa’s plot is just where she remembers it – hidden between green trees a short walk from Octavia’s home. The dwelling is small – maybe three rooms at most, though still far more space than Lexa requires – built of wood and smooth stone, with windows made of glass repurposed from the Alpha Station. One of them is open – presumably to air the empty house – and Lexa wonders how long ahead they knew she was coming. It doesn’t occur to her that any of her friends could have led her home.

There is a lock on the door but it is not fastened. When she enters, there is a pot of water boiling on the woodstove in the corner and a pile of old books splayed across the table in the middle of the room, fencing in a vase of flowers. The room is light, and warm – and _lived in_. For a moment she thinks she has the wrong house, but when she considers the steps she took to get there she is sure: this place is hers.

Two doors mar the rightward wall. One is closed and one is cracked slightly open, and Lexa pads silently towards the latter. She pushes her way through and prepares to knock out whichever unlucky citizen decided her home was the perfect place to crash. It’s a bedroom. She pauses in the doorway.

There is a girl seated on the bed – blonde hair half done in braids, a book in her hands. Clean fingers run across the page, scrape to turn it over – no burns in this life, no marks of who she used to be. She hides her eyes behind a pair of reading glasses with thin steel frames the likes of which Lexa hasn’t known since before the bombs.

‘Oh,’ she says, struck dumb in the doorway – the same greeting, always, but with new intonation.

The woman’s head tilts up – eyes flicking to meet Lexa’s, sky blue and enchanting. White teeth worry a pink lip, biting back the barest hint of a smile and threatening a frown. She sits up warily, turns down the page corner to mark it and sets the book aside – and upon closer inspection Lexa sees that those hands are marred with light scars, all her little histories splayed across her skin. Lexa wants to know: what has this girl done? Who is she now?

Lexa has hidden herself away in the mountains for years, afraid of what she would find when she left it – afraid of not finding anything at all. This girl like sunlight has been waiting for her for who knows how long and all the former Commander can do is wonder when she changed her mind. Trigedasleng slides by her lips before she thinks to stop it.

‘My fight is over,’ Lexa whispers – finally – lips curling around the words.

Clarke is twenty-five, short-sighted, born “Clara” in this life, remembered the rest by thirteen. She grew up in a village nearer the sea, cliff diving for kicks with the other kids and scraping her fingers on the rocks when she climbed back out of the swell. In youth, her hands shook too much for surgery, but steadied just enough to draw a bow. She smiles – and she’s the most beautiful thing that Lexa’s ever seen.

‘Welcome home.’

 

 

\--

 

 

These are the facts:

Lexa loves Clarke.

That is enough.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] move on me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6373450) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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